The automobile and the telephone are defeated as instruments of individualism by being applied to the needs of a mass society. The... automobile fulfills man's desire to move over the surface of the earth all by himself; but by becoming accessible to everybody, automobiles have paralyzed our streets. Individualism is possible only in plenty of empty space. Similarly, telephones block their own paths of individual communication when everybody is talking: the phone is too often "busy." Private enterprise cannot but strangle itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

When we speak the word "life," it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to t...hat fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,No words to say what it really is, that it is not...Superficial but a visible core, then there isNo way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

This surface good-nature which captivates a new acquaintance and is no bar to treachery, which knows no scruple and is never at fa...ult for an excuse, which makes an outcry at the wound which it condones, is one of the most distinctive features of the journalist. This camaraderie (the word is a stroke of genius) corrodes the noblest minds; it eats into their pride like rust, kills the germ of great deeds, and lends a sanction to moral cowardice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshness... of a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory--of the absol...ute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »